Archive for October, 2008

I’ve been busy lately with life in general. I didn’t realize it’s been two weeks now since I last wrote. Thankfully we haven’t had any other fire scares in our area since then. We did mark the one year anniversary of the fire that tore through, well, a year ago. It’s still hard to believe sometimes; what a surreal experience that was…

I finished the Tooth Fairy pillow for Luke; I took a picture but it’s still trapped in my camera. I’ll upload it soon. He hasn’t lost any teeth yet, so I finished it in time! I haven’t had a lot of stitching time lately, but I did spend a few hours this past weekend on Blackstone Fantasy Garden again (Ink Circles). I’m about 60-70% finished, so I may push ahead on that one for awhile.

I guess the only real news I have is that we are house hunting. We are looking to stay in the same area of course, but we are currently in a 2 bedroom duplex and are looking for more space. It’s exciting and stressful and I can’t wait for it to be over but at the same time I want to find the right house. This next house is the one we plan to live in for the next 20 years, barring any catastrophe, so we’re being fairly picky. We put in an offer on a house 7 weeks ago but it’s a short sale and we still don’t have a response back from the bank. It may be a good thing, though, because there’s another house we like better, which actually isn’t a short sale. So, anything could happen at this point…when something *does* happen I’ll be sure to share pictures!

I had planned to write a post yesterday about the looming fire season and general wariness, as inspired by a nightmare that Luke had Sunday night. He woke me up around 12:30 because he’d had a nightmare. In his nightmare he was at school and there was a fire even bigger than the one last year. He and his class evacuated and, in his words, “everyone in my class was okay and really lucky because none of us lost our homes but it really freaked me out.” Yeah, it would freak me out, too. It’s not like I can tell him, oh, go back to sleep it won’t happen, it’s just pretend. After last year, it’s always a terrifying possibility.

So, yeah, I was going to write about it yesterday. But, as things go, I got busy and never got to it. This morning around 11am I was sitting at work when people started talking about fire, and being able to see it from “the front room”. I was busy in my office and assumed they were talking about one of the fires in the area being visible from their home. Then people start milling around in the hall, more than normal. I looked online and couldn’t find anything in the news, but thought I’d go see what was going on. This was the view from work:

Scary! We also got to see an aerial drop, which was extremely effective:

Fire season is definitely upon us. It’s another October in California. Time to keep important papers together, make sure you don’t let your gas tank get below half-full, and be ready at a moment’s notice. I’d like to just skip to Halloween and November already. Thankfully the firefighters got it out really quickly. There are streets closed off within about a half mile of work, but they’re just checking hot spots. What a relief that it didn’t get worse!

In other news, I decided it was time to make Luke a tooth fairy pillow, while he still has teeth to lose (he’s lost 6 so far). He has one that’s just starting to get loose, so I’m going to be feverishly working on that until it’s done.

Well, here it is, Monday morning, and I need a weekend to recover from my weekend! Wow, it was packed with non-stop activity. Here’s a run-down…

Friday night: First we went down to Macy’s to do our registry completion. We finished the place settings of china and the steak knives. Pretty cool since we had rewards and gift cards, and they were on sale, so it was very little out of pocket. To reward Luke for his excellent behavior Tom thought it would be fun to take him to Dave and Busters for dinner and some games. Luke had a *blast*. I got to try the arcade DDR, which is quite a bit different from the version I have for the Wii. It’s the dance pad that is so different and I’d love to try it again. It was really crowded though so I only got on it once.

We were heading back over to the kid-arcade section at one point, passing through a particularly crowded area, when some random guy started talking to me. I stopped for a moment to see if it was someone I knew; I did go to college here and have lived in San Diego for 12 years now, so I do occasionally run into people out of the blue. I determined it wasn’t someone I knew, and we kept walking. He said something else, and Tom and I both turned around. At this point it becomes obvious that the guy was *hitting* on me, which is not exactly something that happens often. He realized at this same point that I was with Tom (who is 6’3″) and he started apologizing profusely. Something along the lines of “I’m sorry, man, I totally didn’t notice, I just saw a beautiful woman and…” blah blah blah. I held up my left hand, Tom was trying not to laugh, and the guy made a hasty retreat with his buddies. At least it was a cute guy, not a gross guy, so it was flattering instead of creepy. He had the decency to be mortified and apologetic, which was nice. But seriously, I was wearing workout pants and a t-shirt, with my hair in a ponytail and no makeup or jewelry, except my engagement and wedding rings. I feel a little bad for the guy, because I expect his buddies won’t let him live that one down for awhile…but I bet he’ll be checking left hands a little more carefully in the future!

Saturday we got up early and headed down to Fiesta Island where the Cub Scouts were camping for the weekend. We didn’t spend the night (which was good since it ended up raining while we were there, shortly after dinner) but we did spend the day there and stayed until the campfire was over, leaving while everyone was brushing their teeth and turning in for the night (and the rain was really starting at that point!). Tom took Luke kayaking, which was definitely the highlight of the day for them both:

Sunday after church we decided at the last minute to go to the Miramar Airshow. We’d been driving past it all weekend, and Luke wanted to see the planes. I fortunately noticed the long lines of traffic and thought to throw my stitching in the car. Getting down there was about as expected, it took probably a half hour to get from the freeway to the parking spot. It was about a mile (maybe more) walk to the actual airshow, so we got a little exercise yesterday. Fortunately we got there in time for Luke to see the Blue Angels. It was great fun, although loud and really, really crowded. Getting out was a nightmare. We got in the car at 4:58. It took over an hour to even get out of the commissary parking lot (which is where we’d been directed to park). We literally drove to the end of the parking lot row and stopped the car for about 45 minutes. It took a total of an hour and a half to get out off the base; it was after 6:30 by the time we were on the freeway heading home. I stitched the entire time, of course, and have a finish to show (well I finished it up last night at home, but got quite a bit done in the car). I was worried it was going to get too dark to stitch, and it nearly was! I finished Brightneedle’s “Spooky Halloween” though:

So, that was my busy weekend. I need another one where I can just relax to recover from it! But at least it was full with good stuff, and Luke was an awfully happy kid when we tucked him in last night! We found out this morning that his soccer team still won their game on Saturday even though 3 kids were missing due to the Cub Scout trip, so now I don’t even feel bad about that. I’m exhausted, but life is good!

Thanks everyone for the kind comments about my wedding pictures! I’ll get more up on flickr at some point. Actually I’m trying to get most of my pictures backed up on flickr since I upgraded to a pro account earlier this year. To reply to some of the comments…my brother on the right, Matt, is the one who got married in March. The one on the left, Michael, is indeed single, and 25. I have his blog linked in my blogroll. 🙂

Sometime in September we went over to our friend’s house to go swimming. This is the family with our adorable flower girl. They have a gorgeous house and a huge backyard and just finished a massive undertaking to embellish their swimming pool. They built a huge rock-like structure with a waterslide, waterfall, and, well it’s pretty awesome and makes us think of an animal enclosure at the zoo (but without the fence, or animals, well I take that back, there were kids!). Our friend has a waterproof camera and we got a few of the pictures from him this week, finally. Here they are:

I jumped off the ledge exactly once and I thought it was terrifying. Luke thought it was even better than the slide and probably did the jump 20 times, or more (and he loved the slide, too). The last picture shows the slide, and I’m in a little pool at the top with my flower girl. 🙂 Her brother is three weeks younger than Luke, so the boys had a fabulous time hanging out in the pool. It was a really hot day, so it was just perfect.

I’ll start with those…if you follow the link there are some more on my flickr page, and I’ll be uploading more as I get a chance. It was SO much fun to look back through the pictures and think about the day. Gosh it was such a blur!! I wish I’d been able to spend more time with everyone.